John Garamendi: “Given all of the talk that is going on and the investigations and questions about deficits and the like, I thought it…”

“Given all of the talk that is going on and the investigations and questions about deficits and the like, I thought it would be useful today to start this discussion, which I will spend most of the evening talking about American manufacturing, but I often want to start these discussions with some sense of value: What is our goal? What are we trying to accomplish here? I keep going back to FDR. At the height of the Great Depression, he said: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.'' And so, last week, the House of Representatives--the Democrats, that is, and maybe just a few Republicans--voted to increase the minimum wage across this Nation so that, over the next 5 years, the minimum wage would rise from, I guess, just over $7 an hour to $15 dollars an hour--not a jump immediately, but over time increase it. Why do we do that? Well, we are for the people. That is our goal: for the people; and keeping in mind what FDR said: It is not about whether we add more to those who have much, but, rather, what we do for those who have little. And so we raise the minimum wage. Why? Because those people who are making $7 an hour across this Nation, they have very, very little, in fact, so little that they cannot have both food and shelter.…”